> I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was.
Quality-wise maybe but nowhere near the same in numbers. Back in 1990-2005 it took expertise to reach the Usenet. Facebook, Reddit et al. changed the game by essentially giving every village idiot without technical knowledge the "freedom" to troll on FB, Youtube, whatever. Conspiracy theories had their own niche usenet spaces, today there are FB groups for all kinds of utter bollocks with hundreds of thousands of members and absolutely no quality or sanity control.
Additionally, for newsgroups you needed some kind of client, most people could only access them after work, further reducing the user base, and there was nothing remotely similar to "likes" - today, people do everything for likes, with instantaneous feedback and no limits (practically everyone has a smartphone with FB and notifications), driving an ever faster and faster "news" cycle.
> And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it
No, this is not US-only. It may be most expressed in the US (and amplified by its two-party system), but us Europeans see the same issue. Brexit is the most obvious, but France, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Germany also have problems with polarization and (mostly) the far right using outright lies to further it, with Russian financing / backing suspected and proven everywhere.
The thing that must change is to get rid of Russian money in politics, and to enforce neutrality and fact based reporting in media.
This. The cost of going on Internet used to be quite high, and requires some skills and knowledge. Nowadays anyone can troll, and they get repeated by other trolls, the percentage of it "may" be the same ( although I doubt it ), but the "absolute" number of those are much much higher.
Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s.
And I agree this is not US only.
So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.
Quality-wise maybe but nowhere near the same in numbers. Back in 1990-2005 it took expertise to reach the Usenet. Facebook, Reddit et al. changed the game by essentially giving every village idiot without technical knowledge the "freedom" to troll on FB, Youtube, whatever. Conspiracy theories had their own niche usenet spaces, today there are FB groups for all kinds of utter bollocks with hundreds of thousands of members and absolutely no quality or sanity control.
Additionally, for newsgroups you needed some kind of client, most people could only access them after work, further reducing the user base, and there was nothing remotely similar to "likes" - today, people do everything for likes, with instantaneous feedback and no limits (practically everyone has a smartphone with FB and notifications), driving an ever faster and faster "news" cycle.
> And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it
No, this is not US-only. It may be most expressed in the US (and amplified by its two-party system), but us Europeans see the same issue. Brexit is the most obvious, but France, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Germany also have problems with polarization and (mostly) the far right using outright lies to further it, with Russian financing / backing suspected and proven everywhere.
The thing that must change is to get rid of Russian money in politics, and to enforce neutrality and fact based reporting in media.